Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Storms Leave Thousands in the Dark

Stormy weather at Lighthouse Field State Beach in Santa Cruz.
Stormy weather at Lighthouse Field State Beach in Santa Cruz.

By Krista Almanzan

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kazu/local-kazu-664637.mp3

Monterey Bay Area – A series of weekend storm has left thousands of people in the Monterey Bay Area in the dark. At the height of the storm 89,000 PG&E customers had no power. Crews working around the clock have cut that number to less than 15,000. Still PG&E spokesman Jeff Smith says it will take until Thursday evening to get everyone back online.
On Sunday Smith explained the challenge they're facing, the difficulty that we are having in Santa Cruz is that it's really rural and rugged terrain to get to, so it's very time consuming and difficult for our crews to get back there in a quick fashion and get powered restored as quickly as possible. In Monterey it's slightly different; it's just the sheer volume of outages. We've got hundreds and hundreds of outages in Monterey. What that means is that for those 24,000 customers that are out, we have to dispatch a crew to repair something be it a wire or a pole and by the time that repair takes place which can take as much as two to three hours in some cases, we may only bring back 10 or 12 customers.
If you still don't have power, you can find out when your outage will be fixed by calling 1-800-PGE-5000, that's 1-800-743-5000.
In the meantime another storm system is set to hit the area on Tuesday, but meteorologists with the National Weather Service say it will not be as bad as the weekend's storms.